“There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The
real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.”2

—G. K. Chesterton

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1989, DAWNED AS GRAY AND COLD IN
East Berlin as the concrete wall that separated it from the West. No
one suspected that by late afternoon a minor government official
would gather reporters together to read from a small piece of paper
that East Germans would no longer need special documents to travel
west. At first, the reporters didn’t understand the significance of what
they had just been told. Then it dawned on them—the Berlin Wall, a
twenty-eight-mile-long barrier that had divided the city for twentyeight years, was officially open and would soon come down.

By the time the reporters got to the wall from the government ministry, the guard towers on both sides were empty and the barbed wire
had been shoved aside in spiky piles. German kids were dancing on
the wall, while others hammered away at it with sledge hammers. And
every last one of them seemed to be wearing Levi’s jeans.

Those jeans, which were far from cheap (if you could even find
them) on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, were part of the American
myth, the stories that remind people they are part of something bigger
than themselves and that carry their values from one generation to the
next.

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: Rebuilding Brand America: What We Must Do to Restore Our Reputation and Safeguard the Future of American Business Abroad.
Contributors: Dick Martin - Author.
Publisher: AMACOM.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 2007.
Page number: 223.

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